In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  That same September Rilke was strolling in Paris, having just returned from a trip around Germany. The newspapers were discussing the theft of the Mona Lisa, which the obscure poet Guillaume Apollinaire was suspected of stealing. 1911 was an ordinary sort of year, no better and no worse than any other year. The Ballets Russes premiered Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe was being slowly published, volume by volume, an endless novel that was much loved by the women of my family (and despised by Proust, who was planning an article “Against Romain Rolland”).

  In April, Lenin began a successful lecture series on political economy on the avenue des Gobelins (another place where my great-grandmother took lodgings). Gorky came to visit him at the end of the month and they discussed the current situation: “There will be a war. It’s inevitable,” said Lenin. In the Jardin du Luxembourg Akhmatova and Modigliani sat on a bench — they couldn’t afford to pay for chairs. Each of these people hardly suspected the existence of the others, they were quite alone in the transparent sleeve of their own fate. Opera hats unfolded with a familiar click at the Opéra — the interval was just beginning.

  A May morning in Paris, close to the Jardin du Luxembourg, with its stone lions and its now free chairs: there’s no question in my mind that Sarra must have strolled here and suddenly — waiting for the place to tell me what I must do — I’m bewildered and lost. The night passed as nights do. The chimneys in the view from the window resembled flowerpots, Kafka said something similar about them. I had no memorable or distinctive dreams or thoughts. I’d spent half the day on a tour around the Sorbonne, gently but firmly led down the usual tourist routes. I’d smiled at the birds, stood motionless looking at shop windows, and checked the museums’ opening hours. The city basked in the sun, showing its pearly innards. People stood, sat, lay in its every fold. I didn’t remember these people from previous visits, they silently stretched out cupped hands from piles of rags and damp newspaper, or approached café tables, one after another with the ancient entreaty. I had nothing left for the last of these, and he shouted hoarse furious words in my face.

  Not far from this place were some little specialist shops selling old cameras and camera accessories: on their shelves lenses and filters stood alongside daguerreotypes and equipment for panoramas, dioramas, and night photography. Forbidden images of the buttocks and breasts of the dead were folded in leaves of rolling paper and placed in boxes. There were large amounts of cards for stereoscopes, those wooden, bird-headed instruments, lending every image a capacious depth. The glossy stereoscope cards had two images on them: you inserted them into a special slot in the instrument and twiddled a wooden beak until the doubled imaged gathered itself into something singular, alive, and convincing. There were hundreds of these cards, showing the streets of Rome; a whole ant heap of quartiers and alleyways from San Pietro down to the Tiber that no longer exist because the wide modern Via della Consiliazione has been driven through it all. There were colorized cards of family scenes; train crashes from a hundred years ago. And there was one card that was unlike any of the others.

  This card also appeared to be made for a stereoscope, but it was a pair of illustrations, rather than photographs, and the two images, although intended for each other, had nothing in common. They were both black cut-out silhouettes (silhouette profiles enjoyed huge popularity in the past). The left-hand image showed a doorway with a curtain across it, a colonnade of some sort and a tree a little farther off. In the right-hand picture was a detailed but unmatching composition: a hussar in a shako, and a goat with horns. When inserted into the stereoscope the two pictures came together into a suddenly animated tableau: the hussar leans on a column’s capital, the goat grazes under the tree, and we see the scene through the curtained door. Two unrelated images shift and come together to make a story.

  The following days and nights I spent in my hotel room. I had flu, a high temperature, and the chimney stacks outside the window multiplied and divided stereoscopically. An endless storm raged outside and it comforted me at first, and then ceased to have any significance. I lay lifelessly on the bed, listening to it crashing overhead and thinking that this wasn’t the worst ending to a pointless sentimental journey. There was nothing for me to do here and I had done nothing in this beautiful foreign city, this large empty bed, under a roof that might or might not remember Sarra Ginzburg, her Russian accent, her French books.

  In the 1960s, quite by chance, a Frenchman visited the family’s Moscow apartment. God only knows where he came from or who he was, but he was royally received, as all guests were, with all the salads known to man, and a homemade Torte Napoleon. All the family joined him at the table, including eighty-year-old Sarra, who had long since disappeared into herself. But when she heard French being spoken she became terribly animated and began speaking in the language of her youth. She sat up talking to the guest until long after midnight — they were both delighted with each other. In the morning she’d switched to speaking French completely and irrevocably, as a person might take vows and vanish into a monastery. When the family spoke to her in Russian she would answer in long French sentences. After a while they learned to understand her.

  2. Little Lyonya from the Nursery

  It was the middle of the night in November. Telephone calls at that hour were always a cause for fear, especially in the years when a single telephone rang in the deep womb-like corridor of a communal apartment, waiting for someone to run to lift the receiver. The voice at the other end was like nothing else they knew, hoarse and gulping, like a voice emerging from a gutter: “Your old man is dying. You should come.” And they went. I was two years old at the time, and fast asleep in a room. I don’t remember anything. Only four months before, my mother’s mother Lyolya had died, at just fifty-eight.

  The building they went to was near-invisible in the night, on a Moscow side street and surrounded by identical, low-eaved two-story buildings. The door swung open and a woman wearing only a slip staggered out in the thin yellow light. There was a room and a bed, and in the bed, in a tangle of bedsheets, lay my grandfather, dead. His naked body was covered in blue bruises. All the lights were switched on, as if it were an operating theater.

  He was hardly an old man, only sixty-two. Only a few years before he had moved into his own cooperatively owned apartment with his wife. Grandfather Lyonya had been very active in the block’s community affairs, planting out a strip of land in front of the white facade of the high-rise with lilac and, most importantly (this was his idea), a row of poplar trees. He wanted to plant the same trees in the backyard; my mother said they reminded him of the south — Grandfather was from Odessa. Now the poplars grew up around the tower block, but the box inside, like the chamber in a pyramid, was empty: no one lived there anymore. The little bouquets Lyolya had picked gathered dust. The box where Grandfather kept his savings books was empty and my mother didn’t know what had happened to them. There were phone calls to the authorities, and police promises to get to the bottom of the matter. Eventually my parents received a single terse call. They were advised not to pursue the matter, it would only make things worse. Although, really, what could be worse?

  This year was a turning point for my family; a whole generation suddenly gone. My mother, Natasha Gurevich, had lost both parents, and she found herself the shepherd of a strange flock. Apart from me, chattering merrily away, she had under her care two ninety-year-old grandmothers, Betya and Sarra, who had always been politely indifferent to each other and suddenly had to live together. The loss of a single son and a single daughter offered their misaligned lives some insulation, a soft layer between them and the new life with its strange cold drafts. Someone once said that the death of our parents marks the loss of the final boundary between ourselves and nonexistence. The death of their children was a wedge jammed in the inner workings of my great-grandmothers. Now nonexistence washed at their boundaries on either side.

  My parents were quite certain t
hat my grandfather had been murdered, but no one knew why or what he’d done, what sinister criminality resided in the place where they had found him, or even how he, a calm, untroubled man, came to end his life there. They could only guess. After Lyolya’s death, when the funeral was over and the family plot at Vostryakovsky Cemetery had opened its mouth for the first time in fifty years to allow a new resident to enter, and then sealed it again, Grandfather called his daughter for a conversation. It turned out he had another woman. He appealed to my mother to react with understanding, to discuss things like adults — the situation might be seen as advantageous for all parties. My mother could go and live in the apartment on Banny Pereulok, where there was more space for a child, and Grandfather and his girlfriend could live in the communal apartment. This was all discussed with a calm businesslike logic, along with the other details: his girlfriend didn’t work and perhaps she could even babysit Masha. She loved children.

  I gathered this story slowly, in its constituent parts, many years later. When I asked how Grandmother and Grandfather had died, I always received the same unwavering, darkly symmetrical response: he died of “lung inflammation,” she of a “heart attack.” I couldn’t quite understand either, and so they disproportionately upset and fascinated me. The heart and lungs were magnified in my child’s imagination, I understood that much depended on them, these human parts that could treacherously inflame and attack. Still, I remember my sense of horror as if it were yesterday, of everything being turned on its head, when my parents told me for the first time at the age of seventeen “what really happened.” I heard the story again a few times, each new account fuller, and in more detail. The story was in itself frightening and unclear, offering no answers. Worst of all was the manner of telling, as if my parents, reluctantly and against their will, were attempting to push back a steel door. The door had rusted into place, it stood in front of a black hole, whistling with an otherworldly chill. They had nothing to say in answer to my questions, not even “who was his girlfriend?” — they knew nothing about her. Back then, in August 1974, my mother had angrily refused to have anything to do with her, or to accept that this unwanted woman, eclipsing Lyolya’s memory, even existed. Three months later Lyonya, with his grand plans, his bristling mustache, and his joyless jokes, was gone, too.

  *

  Lyonya and Lyolya. They were always a pair in my head, their names matched like snap cards. Their childish correspondence, freckled with exclamation marks, beaded with ellipses, dates from 1934, when life still seemed eternal, a thing of substance, when the summer move out to the dacha was undertaken on a horse and cart, and the line of hired carts stretched through the Moscow morning, laden with goods and chattels, trunks of bedlinen, kerosene stoves and samovars — as if this was the only way to do things. Some of the previous generation’s rituals and formalities were still in place despite the new life, the circus-ring gallop of new friends and lovers. In time Lyonya proposed, and his proposal was gladly accepted, but accompanied by a few clauses and conditions. They didn’t rush to have children, just as they had promised, and life had the faintly lazy feel of a holiday in the warm south. They went to the sea and their photos show a slope of rocks, and the holidaymakers posing against it, the black beetle of a car, and the bright moth wings of dresses. Lyolya completed her medical training, Lyonya graduated from the Construction Institute with very respectable grades and began working. And then there were the things that weren’t ever discussed: both these young Soviet professionals filled in the usual forms, and in the box marked “social background” they, like others, avoided mentioning certain things, or twisted the facts slightly to make them acceptable. Lyolya’s father’s legal title was downgraded to “clerk,” and then hurriedly to the even less objectionable “employee.” “Merchant of the 1st Guild” became “shopkeeper” or “tradesperson.” There was a special box for relatives abroad and that was better left empty. In that box, Lyonya wrote: “My dead aunt’s husband was transferred to London for work. I do not keep up contact with him.”

  In 1938 the forms asked whether Lyonya had served in the old Tsarist army, or in any organization connected with the White Government, and if so in what capacity? Did he serve in the Civil War and if so, when, where and in what capacity? Did he suffer persecution as a result of revolutionary activity leading up to the October Revolution? The form also asked how the subject had fared in the last purges in the party. There were even more questions in the 1954 form: Have you been in prison? Fought in a partisan group? Lived in occupied territory? In every box a blue-inked NO is scrawled.

  His daughter Natasha never quite forgave him for his lively haste to move on to a new life after his wife’s death, nor for her sudden realization that the old life had had a false bottom. When we spent our evenings together, with the old photographs and memories, this was never mentioned, but later, when I began studying the inexhaustible contents of drawers and boxes, I discovered strange objects, artifacts that fell outside of the “tone” of the household: postcards, notes, little objects that fitted a different shape or order — not ours, but not Soviet, either. A drawing in color, for example, of a very carefully drawn heart, divided in two. The dotted line down the middle was highlighted in red, and at the bottom someone had written: “IT’S HARD FOR BOTH OF US.” Teardrops with light reflections were dripping down on the letters. Or a New Year’s greeting card in a homemade envelope with the inscription: “Open on December 31 at 10:00 p.m.” The woman who wrote the card and sealed it with wax and the impression of a Soviet kopeck had known that the addressee, at his own family celebration, would have no time for her at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Inside was a poem and a letter, signed, “your little friend.” The miniature nature and inexperience of the “little friend” were given rather insistent emphasis by the letter: “I am writing to you and drawing a Christmas tree, my head on one side with the childish effort, I’ll put the clock hands on the picture when it reaches midnight. Happy New Year, Leonid!” And the poem carried this further: “Like your daughter, I’ll find my place too / under the Christmas tree.” And all of this, the picture and even the kopeck imprint, had survived for some reason.

  Later, when my parents had left Russia and the flat was empty, I would still find marvelous things from time to time (a whole handful of silver spoons scattering from an overhead cupboard where we kept nails and bottles of turps), but I was beginning to lay its depths bare. I found, among the papers, the most various things: my acquaintance of old, the unknown naked woman on the divan, and another picture, which I have before me right now.

  I am touched, not by the “piquant scene” as they might have said back then, but by all the objects indicative of an era. A blonde woman in dark-colored knickers and bra sits with an unlit cigarette. It reminds me of a home movie from the nineties, a genre painting adapted for home and for a single viewer. It’s a stylized shot, a Russian pin-up, done with half an eye on seen or invented examples of the genre, and an attempt to adapt them to a set of completely unsuitable circumstances. It’s a conservative image, most things are strategically covered up, but this doesn’t stop it being reckless and even indecent.

  A fresh copy of the Soviet newspaper Pravda makes the photograph dangerous (placing a naked lascivious ass on the party organ could get you a few years in prison), not to mention the packet of Belomor cigarettes (with the emblem of the White Sea Canal, built by slave labor) in her left hand. The country’s main newspaper and its cheapest cigarettes, stubby and potent, are brought together like heraldic symbols, linked by the female body. The body seems indifferent to both. The room looks like a temporary lean-to, an institutional bathhouse dressing room. The high heels resemble cabaret costume, along with the underwear, which is too well cut for Soviet underwear. All this at the end of the 1940s, or the very beginning of the 1950s, the holy winter of Stalin’s rule with its ponderous sensibility, the rows of party cars lined up at theater stage doors, a second wave of terror, the “Doctors’ Plot.”
In the corner of the picture, stuck up on a limewashed wall, is a crass caricature of a “capitalist” doffing his hat.

  In later, safer years Grandfather Lyonya found himself another occupation to add to his many activities: he began writing and publishing satirical sketches of various kinds. These were mostly funny little anecdotes, short jokey dialogues or paradoxical phrases, sometimes also didactic prose, and some strange little hybrids — work reports in verse, for example. His ease with rhyme — he had a natural virtuosity, he could fit any subject into its neat envelope — did not improve his writing. His anecdotes were funny, though, and were even sometimes published in the top Soviet satirical magazine of the era, Krokodil. He stuck the clippings proudly into special exercise books. I remember some from my childhood: “Never eat on an empty stomach!” was one. A favorite mode of his was writing little stories about “other cultures and customs.” He would write about different, half-invented worlds, peopled by hopelessly bourgeois Frenchmen called Pierre and Antoine, but the satire slid into something stranger, as if the story was about a dream that could never be realized, and all that was left was to make fun of it.

  Any anecdote is just a novel compressed down to a point, and it can equally well be reinflated to elephantine proportions. The opposite must also exist, when your intended meaning is too large even to want to try to fit it to a form. My grandfather’s jokes (they were printed anonymously) were based on the belief in another world that bubbled up with attractive possibilities, a world in which erotic excitement hung in the air, a world of live and let live. There was something perennially old-fashioned in them, as if the characters wore bowler hats and cuff links: “At his wife’s funeral Mr. Smiles comforted his wife’s weeping lover: now don’t you take on so, I’ll be married again in a tick!”